c. 1996 Religion News Service

SAN FRANCISCO _ Given the stinging rhetoric that accompanied Congress’ recent approval of the Defense of Marriage Act, it’s hard to imagine homosexual-rights activists having much reason for optimism.

Signed Sept. 21 by President Clinton, the new federal law defines marriage as a contract”between one man and one woman,”and allows any state to ignore gay marriages legally contracted in other states. The measure swept through Congress _ with votes of 342-67 in the House and 85-14 in the Senate _ after backers warned that gay marriages are immoral and would threaten social chaos.”The very foundations of our society are in danger of being burned,”said Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., one of the sponsors of the measure.

Even liberal stalwarts like Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) voted in favor of DOMA.

So much for gay marriage and the gay family.

Not so fast, homosexual-rights activists say.

While passage of DOMA was a setback, they argue that the war to secure full family rights for gays and lesbians is anything but over.

For starters, they say, the law is vulnerable to a court challenge on constitutional grounds and could be overturned in as little as two years.

But taking an even longer view, some activists view the law as a minor stumbling block for a broad cultural movement to gain full family rights for homosexuals. Gay families, they contend, will continue to move into the mainstream of American society.”Twenty years ago, you had to look for a long time to find a (gay or lesbian) couple that had been together 10 or 12 years,”said Oakland school teacher Mel Stenger, 40. Stenger has been in a partnership for 14 years with psychotherapist Vince Morgante, 49.”It’s not hard anymore to find a gay couple who have been together 10 years. It’s part of the culture.” Not only are Morgante and Stenger a committed couple, they also are the fathers of two adopted boys. As parents, they say they face the same sorts of challenges heterosexual parents face.”We really have the same problems as every other family,”said Stenger.”Getting the kids to go to sleep at night, getting them not to hurt each other, getting them to pay attention in kindergarten and grammar school. The only difference is the discrimination, the lack of understanding and support.” The visibility _ and apparent normality _ of couples like Stenger and Morgante are the forces that will propel gays into mainstream society, according to policy analyst John D’Emilio.”We are seeing a process of both mainstreaming and normalization of same-sex coupledom,”said D’Emilio, director of the policy institute for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington.”That’s creating a new environment in which, with each passing year, more and more Americans will view the issue of gay marriage differently,”he said.”It creates a cultural and social climate in which, some day, the issue will no longer appear controversial.” Giving marriage rights to homosexuals might have appeal on civil rights grounds, said David Blankenhorn, director of the Institute for American Values in New York. But he contends society must consider the public policy ramifications of homosexual parenting before deciding to make”a radical shift in the oldest institution in civilization.”To me the threshold question is: What is a marriage and what is good for children?”Blankenhorn said. His answer:”It’s been the conviction of all human societies that the preferred way to bring children into the world and raise them is through a mother-father child-raising unit. Everything we learn from social science tells us that this is best.” But that traditional wisdom is being challenged daily _ not only by members of the gay community, but also in corporate America, as employers acknowledge that some of their workers are involved in unions that do not consist, as Congress defines it,”of one man and one woman.” Growing numbers of employers are extending health and welfare benefits to partners and children of gay and lesbian employees. While Congress was debating the legitimacy of homosexual marriage, the city of Denver and IBM Corp. both announced they would begin granting such benefits.

Approximately 300 other companies _ including Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Disney Co., Oracle and Capital Cities/ABC _ already had granted so-called”domestic partner benefits.”So had several governments, including the states of Massachusetts, New York and Vermont and the cities of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Boston.

Local governments have also begun setting up domestic partnership registries to permit couples to declare their commitment in a civil setting, albeit without the sanction or the rights heterosexual marrieds enjoy. Among them are the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, West Hollywood and Washington.

In March, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown presided over a city-sponsored public wedding ceremony for 150 city-registered gay and lesbian couples.

Civic pronouncements aside, the most important engine for change will be the growing visibility and acceptability of gay and lesbian families, including the many gay couples who are rearing children. Such families have been a fact of life for at least a generation.

Statistical evidence is meager on the numbers of gay and lesbian”families”in the United States. But a recent report from the American Psychological Association that culls data from social science research journals estimates there may be up to 5 million lesbians and 3 million gay men who are parents in the United States. The report also estimates that as a many as 14 million children may have come from homosexual parents. Those families have emerged despite the absence of laws favoring homosexual families.

Another survey, commissioned by the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights lobbying group, interviewed 354 gays, lesbians and bisexuals between June and September. The poll found that 46 percent of gays and lesbians are in what they described as”long-term, monogamous”relationships. Of that number, 18 percent are parents to minors who live at home. The survey, which was performed by Washington, D.C.-based Lake Research Inc., has a margin of error of 5.2 percent.

As the numbers of gay parents increase, so does their activism, which may be another factor in changing attitudes.

Kim Lawton, 40, a management assistant at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, has struggled to defuse homophobic school situations confronting her 10-year-old daughter, Abby, whom Lawton raises with her partner of 11 years, Betty Bryant, a 42-year-old computer programmer.

Lawton describes how one day, when she went to pick up Abby, she found a group of school kids taunting one another as”fags”and”lezzies.””I broke it up,”she said, by taking aside the offending children and saying:”`I’m a lesbian and there’s nothing wrong with us _ and you’re not supposed to make other kids feel bad anyway.'” Lawton reported the incident to the principal and later wrote a letter asking the school to help educate the children about the need for sensitivity to kids of gay and lesbian parents. The letter was circulated to teachers, who discussed homophobia with their students.”It really ended very well,”Lawton said.”My daughter felt very good about it.” Gay activists say these sorts of interactions are becoming more common. They will eventually contribute to a climate in which homosexual families are mainstreamed _ notwithstanding the Defense of Marriage Act.”That’s one of the paradoxes of the gay movement,”D’Emilio said. As conservatives introduce legislation and ballot initiatives to thwart the emergence of the gay family,”the effect it ends up having is to bring more people out of the closet and to raise the level of expectation of what equality would look like.””Twenty years ago, there were not many gay men and lesbians who identified equality as involving either the right to marry or the right to parent,”notes D’Emilio.”Now it’s increasingly common for that to be part of the political goals of the gay and lesbian community.”

MJP END AQUINO